


Formal Beauty

by mothinthearclight



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 09:55:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21426304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothinthearclight/pseuds/mothinthearclight
Summary: Sometimes, Honorine keeps a painting for herself. This time, the painting keeps her.
Relationships: Art Thief/Woman in Painting
Comments: 15
Kudos: 37
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Formal Beauty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).

In dreams, she walked the moorlands arm-in-arm with the Woman. The breeze was cool, and promised rain later, in this day that never ended; the manor house in the distance never grew nearer or more far. The Woman's long white skirts brushed Honorine's trousers as they walked.

"I want to see an autumn," the Woman said. Her voice was smooth and low, and it made Honorine's head spin. "You don't have any autumns." 

"Of course," said Honorine. She wanted to lay down in the heather and watch the clouds race by, but they did not move. She wanted to bend down and kiss the Woman, but in this painting they had always been arm-in-arm, at this precise distance from one another, and always would be.

-

It was pretty enough, but the piece's condition was too poor to be of interest to her fence, and the painter was unknown to boot. This was what Honorine had told herself when she'd decided to keep the painting. She deserved something nice, now and then, for the apartment she never came home to—something to work on in her spare moments. The business of stealing fine art was more profitable than the business of conserving it, for sure, but she still had her paints and her solvents and varnish removers. 

The painting was a small canvas depicting a street in a small town. In the distance, there was the sea. In the foreground, a woman in a white dress stood holding a small, flowered hat in her hand, looking off at something just outside the frame. 

"Poor thing," Honorine had said, looking the painting over with a UV light. One conservator had inpainted some areas of loss and done a fine job of it, but some hack had retouched the woman's dress and had added a pattern to the hem that had not been there in the original. In the grand scheme of things, would be a simple matter to remove it, and so Honorine did. 

-

She stole a painting of an autumn landscape for the Woman. It wasn't difficult.

Only the finest would do. Honorine had tried, in the beginning, to paint new scenes for the Woman, and this had satisfied her for a time. But the best Honorine could do was imitations of the great masters. Excellent, faultless imitations, but no more than that. The Woman's disappointment when they walked through the busy night streets, or sat in a jazz club, or watched a sunrise on the riverbank, was palpable. Well. Honorine was a forger, an art thief. She could get her love what she wanted. 

-

Once she'd restored it, Honorine hung the painting in her sunny breakfast nook and ate her bagel and drank her morning coffee looking at it every day for weeks before she noticed something was amiss. Another painting she'd kept for herself—a Monet, The Artist's Garden at Argenteuil—she'd forged the copy that hung in the National Gallery herself—hung on the wall above her bed. Something moved her to study it one day. There should have been two tiny figures, one clad in black and one in white, in the corner of the painting. The figure in black was gone. Only the woman in white remained, with her white hat perched on her head. 

She saw the woman again the next day, in a watercolor of a boat that had been empty the day before.

And again, in a Van Gogh Honorine was nervously waiting to sell, a painting of golden wheat fields. And again, and again, for weeks. Each time, she appeared in the painting's own style, rendered in abstract shapes, in gouache, fine inks, in risograph, but always in her white dress, with her white hat. At first it was a curiosity, and then a delight. 

Then, one night, she dreamed of the Woman. 

\- 

"Stay with me," the Woman said in dreams, stroking Honorine's face. They were in a Gauguin. The air smelled crisp and clean. The leaves crunched softly under their feet as they walked down the up the path of the endless hill. "You can't hunger here, and you don't age. We could be together. I'll never tire of you, my darling love." 

Something animal in Honorine clawed at the back of her mind to _wake up,_ to _run,_ that this was a _predator,_ but there was nowhere to go. Besides, she did love the Woman. So long as her painting hung in Honorine's house, they could be together. 

"If I stayed here," Honorine said, gathering her wits, "who would give you new homes? People"—she still had friends, contacts, she still left the house—"would realize I was missing."

"We could pick one we liked and be in it." 

"Could you be satisfied with just one?" 

"I could be satisfied with you," said the Woman. "Only you." 

The first dream was short: the last place the Woman had been today was a painting of a seashore, and so that was where Honorine found herself, barefoot in the sand. 

She knew with absolute certainty that this was real, and not some figment. The sun was hot on her face, the seagulls moving in a perfect circle in the sky. 

The Woman said, "Hello," her eyes wide and startled, as though she had not expected to be interrupted in her contemplation of the ocean. Her dress fluttered in the wind, untouched by the surf. 

"Oh. Hey," Honorine said, and woke up.

-

Eventually, after a year of being together in dreams, it had come to pass that the Woman could appear to Honorine not only in paintings, but in anything that had a frame. She would see her over her shoulder in mirrors, in cars' windshields, in bus windows. Thus, she carried her love with her through the day. 

"I miss you," the Woman said, materializing in the mirror of a grocery store bathroom, while Honorine washed her hands. 

When she manifested in the real world, as something very much like flesh and bone, she was achingly, shatteringly beautiful. It was just as well that no one but Honorine could see her; Honorine could not have borne the thought of sharing the Woman with other people's eyes. She had never been a jealous person, before now. She'd stopped inviting people to her apartment. 

"I'll be home soon," said Honorine. Someone was in one of the stalls, but she didn't care; let them think she was on the phone, or crazy. 

Out here, the Woman could touch her, and did. She ran the backs of her fingers—impossibly slim, exquisitely shaped—down the side of Honorine's face. "I'll be waiting." 

-

The second and third dreams were similarly short, but in the fourth:

They were in the garden at Argenteuil. Honorine looked down and saw that she was wearing the gentleman's black suit. The blooms were a riot of color, and the Woman stood next to her, looking serene. "You see me," she said. 

"Every day," said Honorine, as though this, being inside of a painting in a dream, was a normal thing that happened to people. "All over my apartment." 

"You live in a wonderful place," said the Woman. "I haven't stretched my legs in such a long time." 

Honorine stared at the Woman, searching for something to say. The Woman was so beautiful and graceful, her fingers brushing lightly over the hedgerow and the breeze blowing through her loose hairs as she began walking away from Honorine; _What _are _you?_ seemed rude, somehow.

"Can I see you again?" she asked, instead. 

The Woman turned back and smiled, luminous in her joy. "Of course." 

-

On the way home from the grocery store, she sat down on the train in the same elegant way the Woman did, when Honorine dreamed of a domestic scene. She'd taken to wearing white, in her everyday life—she told herself at first it was because it was a clean color, because linen was comfortable in the summer heat. But she'd caught herself running her fingers over peony bushes with the same flourish as the Woman's. She was tired, all the time.

Part of her knew that she should be frightened. But, a larger part of her thought, in a domestic scene, they could be happy. She wouldn't even have to steal a painting—she could forge them a cozy Vermeer, full of clean light, and withdraw to it.

She looked in the bus window from the corner of her eye, and saw the Woman staring back at her, sitting primly in the seat next to her on the bus. Superimposed on and incongruous with the Saturday afternoon crowd, with a faint smile on her face, she rested her head on Honorine's shoulder. 

_Not yet,_ Honorine thought. She still had herself, or pieces of herself. The Woman had not taken everything from her. She would eventually, but—not yet. Not yet.


End file.
